Aliens

The joke goes; “We know there is intelligent life out there ‘coz they’ve not contacted us”.

I am not particularly interested in aliens in the conventional sense; the little green men in flying saucers and the certainty that somewhere in the universe there exists a civilisation waiting to explain everything to us. My images are merely speculations on the variants one might eventually encounter, but there is also pondering behind them.

The figures are biological beings. Biology might not be their defining characteristic, though, as they will have modified themselves repeatedly, generation after generation, until evolution and engineering have become indistinguishable. Their bodies will be neither natural nor artificial. They will simply be the current version of themselves.

In this respect they may not be alien at all.

Humanity has already begun the same journey. We repair failing organs, alter genes, outsource memory to machines, and increasingly inhabit worlds constructed from information rather than matter. The difference is only one of degree. The visitors depicted here will have travelled much further down that road and I imagine them arriving not as conquerors but as evidence that intelligence doesn’t stand still.

These beings may have discovered that inherited characteristics are not fixed. Intelligence, memory, sensory systems, lifespan, physical appearance, emotional architecture—even consciousness itself—may have become design decisions. The organism would still have origins in biology, but biology would no longer hold a monopoly on determining its future form, as if evolution has imbued some forms of life with the capability to direct evolution.

Does the visitors’ appearance seem unsettling? Perhaps it should. We are accustomed to reading faces, bodies, and gestures for signs of kinship. These beings offer few such reassurances as their forms have been shaped by purposes we cannot easily infer and environments we have never experienced. They certainly possess a physical logic, but not necessarily one that aligns with our own expectations.

Yet the unease may reveal more about us than about them. We fear what resists classification. We prefer clear boundaries between machine and organism, self and tool, nature and invention. The visitors occupy none of these categories. They exist in the spaces between them.

As I worked on these images, I found myself wondering whether a sufficiently advanced civilisation would still recognise us. Perhaps identity becomes fluid. Perhaps bodies become provisional. Perhaps appearance becomes a choice rather than a consequence.

These images are, in my mind, more about us than them. They’re fragments from a future in which our intelligence has made us both architect and material and where evolution is no longer something that happens to a species, but something a species does to itself.

The question is not whether such beings exist. The question is whether, given enough time, we would become like them.